ON: The Tales That Really Matter
Fantasy and defiant hope
Song of the Week: “Soldier, Poet, King,” by the Oh Hellos - “There will come a poet / whose weapon is his word / He will slay you with his tongue / oh lei oh lai oh Lord”1
This week has been one of the most heartbreaking weeks of my life.
I came back from New Zealand happy and hopeful, excited to tell you about its stunning natural beauty, the people’s incredible friendliness, and the nation’s inspiring centering of Māori language and culture. But first, I thought, I would write a post celebrating the power of democracy. I would write about how when we worked together we had the power to build coalitions and preserve our freedoms and elect the first female president of the United States.
Instead, I watched my dreams and the dreams of my friends die in real time.
Instead, I learned that people will choose a gleeful bully, a pathological liar, a swindler and a rapist, an aspiring dictator, and a violent traitor who has spoken openly of his contempt for the Constitution and belief he is above the rule of law, over a highly qualified, patriotic, and fundamentally decent candidate, simply because she is a woman. Twice.
Instead, I learned that more than seventy million people were willing to trade democracy for cheaper eggs.
After the panic attack, after the night spent lying awake shaking and crying, after the hours spent calling and texting the people I love to grieve together, I said to a friend: “I hate that it feels like all the stories I love have been preparing me for this moment.”
The Stories That Stayed With You
Anyone who has been reading Syllabus for a while - or who knows me at all - knows that I love The Lord of the Rings. All day, as is always the case when I face dark times, its words echoed in my head:
Frodo telling Gandalf that he wished that none of this had happened, and Gandalf reminding him that all we have to do is decide what to do with the time that is given us.
Gimli despairing that it was all in vain and the Fellowship had failed, and Aragorn reminding him that there was still hope as long as they hold true to each other.
And, most of all, Sam’s speech to Frodo at the end of The Two Towers.2
“I can’t do this, Sam,” Frodo whispers. He is utterly exhausted, sees no way forward, no hope, no future.
“I know,” Sam says wearily. “It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are.”
Sam: It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad happened?
But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something. Even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. Because they were holding on to something.
Frodo: What are we holding on to, Sam?
Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo. And it’s worth fighting for.
J. R. R. Tolkien was a veteran of World War I. He fought at the Battle of the Somme, falling asleep at night in muddy trenches to the sound of whistling shells and screaming men. All but one of his close friends died in the war, and the only one who survived - an aspiring composer - never wrote another piece of music for the rest of his life. The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien remarked once to a friend, “is about Death and the desire for deathlessness.”
World War I was also the defining event of literary modernism - a movement that produced beautiful writing and art that was nonetheless often defined by its irony, alienation, and hopelessness. In many ways, Tolkien - who is often described as the father of modern fantasy literature - was the creator of an alternative to modernism. In fantasy literature, he writes in his wonderful essay On Fairy Stories, he finds “Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation.”
In his work, Tolkien reveled in language, composed poetry and myth, and expressed his deep reverence for the natural world. But he also used his work to articulate a strong moral vision.
As Jane Chance writes:
Key are his humanism and his feminism - his sympathy for and toleration of those who are different, unimportant, or marginalized - the alien, the rustic, the commoner, the poor, the female, and the other. Conversely, Tolkien throughout his work and his letters expressed strong repugnance for the fascist, the despot, the master, and the king who exploit, abuse, or kill those who serve them.3
Tolkien’s work is so powerful, I think, because he endured so much horror. He survived the crushing weight of despair. The hope he writes about is not naive. It is battle-born.
Forms of Survival
I wrote, a few months ago, about the power of Black cosplay - the ways in which people transform our imagination of heroism using creativity and their bodies. That research into Black cosplay was part of a paper I wrote in graduate school for a class I took on Afrofuturism: a genre of science fiction and fantasy literature, film, and art by and about Black people.
Some Afrofuturist works translate and recontextualize Black history - reimagining the Middle Passage as a kind of alien abduction, or using time travel to illuminate the horrors of slavery, as Octavia Butler does in her fantastic novel Kindred. Others, such as Marvel’s Black Panther or Into the Spider-Verse imagine Black characters with superpowers who can protect the vulnerable and intervene in contemporary society. Still others take place far in the future or in other worlds, such as Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti novels or N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season.
“What I like about Afrofuturism…it’s like this way of talking about Black people in a way that’s really hopeful,” says journalist Neil Drummond in this episode of This American Life about the genre.
One of the things that’s sort of really specific about Afrofuturism that I like is that it takes into account the past in a lot of ways. It imagines that, you know, Black people have forms of survival through, you know, the slave trade, through persecution, that’s almost a technology in itself, the ways in which we’ve come through those things…everything that’s been a part of our culture has made it possible for us to pave the way for the future. That’s the thing that I like about it, I think - the feeling like, despite whatever trials or travails you’ve come through, that you will exist in the future.
Humans Need Fantasy
It has been easy, these last couple of days, to feel foolish for having had so much hope. To be ashamed of being so publicly and utterly disappointed.
It feels naive to turn to wizards and hobbits in the face of looming environmental destruction, rampant cruelty, attacks on our bodies and our freedoms. But then I think, as always, of Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather (1996).
Hogfather, the twentieth novel in Pratchett’s comic fantasy Discworld series, is ostensibly a novel about a plot to kidnap and assassinate the Hogfather - the fantasy equivalent of Santa Claus. At its core, however, it is really a novel about the power and importance of belief.
In the novel’s climax, the anthropomorphized character of Death discusses that belief with his granddaughter, Susan.4
“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
"So we can believe the big ones?"
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
"They're not the same at all!"
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"
MY POINT EXACTLY.
Imagination
In her essay “The Critics, the Monsters, and the Fantasists,” Ursula K. LeGuin discusses the frequent dismissal of fantasy literature by modern literary critics as frivolous, childish, or irrelevant. Critics, she argues, will claim that only realistic (that is, non-magical) literature can truly address the human experience, can be truly insightful.
And yet, she says, it is a lack of imagination that has led to so many of the horrors we face: An inability to imagine solutions other than violence and destruction. An inability to imagine a society without poverty or hunger. An inability to imagine that those who live their lives differently may share the same humanity.
“Fantastists are perhaps trying to assert and explore a larger reality than we now allow ourselves,” LeGuin writes. “They are trying to restore the sense - to regain the knowledge - that there is somewhere else, anywhere else, where other people may live another kind of life. The literature of imagination, even when tragic, is reassuring, not necessarily in the sense of offering nostalgic comfort, but because it offers a world large enough to contain alternatives, and therefore offers hope.”
I don’t know, in the days and weeks and months that will follow, that I will always be able to find hope. But I know I will have these stories.
And I know that I will have you, and you will have me, and somehow, together, we will keep going.
We are worth fighting for.
When it comes to the tales that really matter, what should I add to my syllabus?
I want to hear from you, whether it’s in the comments on this post or in emails to me directly at roschmansyllabus@substack.com!
“Soldier, Poet, King” is from an album called Dear Wormwood, which is based on the work of C. S. Lewis. The titular soldier, poet, and king refer to the prophetic roles of Jesus, who returns at the end of the Biblical narrative to restore justice and unseat empires who claim to rule in his name. Despite the song’s inspiration, it has gained popularity among fantasy and science fiction fans, who frequently apply it to trios of characters from works like The Lord of the Rings and The Hunger Games.
This scene, as well as the later scene about “Samwise the Brave,” are distillations of a longer passage from the chapter “The Stairs of Cirith Ungol” in the novel.
Chance, Jane. Tolkien, Self and Other: “This Queer Creature.” Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pg. xi.
Death speaks EXCLUSIVELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS, LIKE THIS, and is one of the most sympathetic and lovable characters in the Discworld series. In order to understand why he has a granddaughter (via adoption), see the previous Discworld book Mort (1987).